hear the wind sing

from Haruki Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979):

A newspaper reporter once asked Heartfield, “Your protagonist dies twice on Mars and once on Venus. Isn’t there a contradiction here?”

To which Heartfield responded, “Do you know how time passes in outer space?”

“No,” replied the reporter, “but that’s something nobody knows.”

“Then tell me, what’s the point of writing a novel about something everyone knows?”