A Face Like His Own — A Man Who Drifted Through a Yuragi Meets a Local Office Worker Who Looks Identical

Shortly after 4 a.m. on the 15th, a covert patrol officer on a round along a deserted stretch of Fukagawa's seawall found a man sitting alone and reported him. He appeared to be in his thirties or forties, dressed in clothing too thin for the season; he responded to being spoken to but produced no speech matching Hinokuni's language or any other officials present could identify. Within roughly 200 meters of where he was found, the permeation index had briefly spiked in the predawn hours — far too short to reach "alert" level — and on that basis the TDA took him into protective custody as a drifter under the Dimensional Boundary Management Act.

On record, a single living person drifting in has been extremely rare since the mass arrival of 1975, and a TDA spokesperson said, "All we can say is that something that almost never happens in ordinary times has happened now." The man had no visible injuries and is in good health; at the facility holding him, officials are examining his belongings for identifying clues and conducting basic health checks.

As part of the intake procedure, the TDA entered the man's photograph into its internal matching database — a routine safety step, officials said, similar to checking against missing-persons reports. On the 16th, an official told this paper, "In the course of that check, we got a startlingly close match to the photo of a 37-year-old office worker living locally. We weren't suspecting any link to a disappearance or crime; we simply informed him of the fact first and asked how he wanted to proceed."

The office worker lives in Fukagawa and works at a trading company in the city; his name has not been released at his request. Speaking anonymously about hearing from the TDA, he said, "At first I thought it was some kind of scam using my face. Then they showed me the photo, and I stopped being sure I actually look like that."

With his consent, the two met in a room at the facility on the afternoon of the 16th under TDA supervision. According to a staff member present, the meeting lasted only a few minutes and produced no conversation, but when the office worker pointed to his own face and then to the drifted man's, the drifted man made the same gesture back. "Both of them looked less startled than they looked like they were checking something. We didn't let it run long," the staff member recalled.

As a precaution, the TDA examined whether the two were related by blood; no genetic connection was found. Their fingerprint patterns did not match at all — only skeletal measurements came out close. "We confirmed the premise that a similar face and shared blood are two different things. Beyond that, this inquiry can't tell us more," an official explained.

The only items the man carried were a small leather pouch and a single engraved metal ring. Isotope analysis by the Third Appraisal Center found no match among the known 152 lineages, and the items were registered on the 16th as the provisional 153rd lineage. The ring's engraving is a geometric pattern that, for now, shows no clear resemblance to the previously reported "formula" placards from Window 5, "the Sword Country," or the symbols on the provisional Lineage 148 metal pillar. "We don't assign lineage numbers to a person. What got registered this time is the provenance of the items he was carrying," a center official explained. As for the man's own world of origin, there is no speech or writing to go on, and the investigation itself has no established method yet.

At its briefing on the 16th, the TDA repeated, "We won't read any special meaning into the resemblance. Both the possibility that he came from a coincidentally similar lineage and the possibility of pure chance remain on the table." The office worker said, "Honestly, the uneasy feeling hasn't gone away. But I also understand it isn't his fault." Asked about any future contact, he said only that he would follow the TDA's procedures. The drifted man's future status — naturalization, choosing a name — is expected to follow the same process used for the 1975 drifters, as previously reported, though officials expect it to take longer than usual given the total absence of any linguistic foothold. Both his origin and the meaning of the resemblance remain unexplained, left to stand.