an evening star

Looking up Otoshigo 落とし子 on the dictionary here or here, the term can mean 'a nobleman's illegitimate child', evil/undesirable consequences/aftermath. The Kanji 落 on its own can mean 'fall/drop' or 'decrease' or even 'to be missing', and the Kanji 子 means child.

(What's also really interesting to me, as a Cantonese speaker who writes in traditional Chinese characters, is that we still colloquially use 落仔 in Cantonese to refer to abortion - but I'm not sure if the Kanji in Japanese or the term 落とし子 has similar connotations.)

When were there a lot of lost children in Kibogayama? When the villagers back in the day used to abort their babies due to harsh living conditions, like how Maki explains it in Chapter 23?

What if all those children-to-be-that-never-were became something else, something outside of the cycle of life and death on the Other Side?

What's more, when 'Hikaru' climbed to the Other Side to close the hole inside the cave in Ashidori 足取, Maki's home town, he was essentially taking on the role of those Hōko 這子 dolls that are believed to have crawled over the Other Side to close the holes with needles and threads (Chapter 31).

Yoshiki then theorises that it would have been actual children that the villagers sent through the holes (also Chapter 31) --

'Hikaru' is an immortal entity, not one of those children who got sent through to the Other Side to die, sure, but the mirroring between him (armed with a stapler this time, not needle and thread) and those children is quite something

'...But what happened to the children after that?' Yoshiki asks. I wonder if they might not have become 'lost children' Otoshigo 落とし子?

That would give a whole new context to 'Hikaru' saying, 'For the first time, I was livin' as a human... For the first time, I got to enjoy school, friends, and even ice cream', wouldn't it

Welp, I might just have tinfoil hat on for too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯