In case you haven’t noticed, sci-fi is back on the menu in the West, with the likes of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming summer blockbuster Disclosure Day looming over the horizon and Ryan Coogler’s hotly anticipated X-Files series drip-feeding fans with tantalizing news of its production. In the animanga territory, however, the genre’s popularity never left. Granted, the scene’s been rife with battle shonen of Jujutsu Kaisen‘s ilk rather than a genuine mystery thriller. If you’re hankering for a read that plays out like an old-fashioned supernatural thriller, you should peep Divine Incursions.
Based on Oumi Kifuru’s light novel series, Divine Incursions, by Kouya Ashitaka, is a detective-style mystery series whose premise is basically X-Files set in After God‘s FUBAR supernatural world. Any debate over whether gods exist is old hat because there are too many strange things happening around the world for anyone to be a nonbeliever. The strongest evidence pointing to some sort of divine being lording over us is giant body parts raining from the sky. The everyday lives of the unfortunate denizens in Divine Incursions‘ world are essentially a greatest hits of Junji Ito horrors, with folks either making their peace with them or spiraling into cultish superstition to explain why their lives are so bizarrely messed up.
Humanity’s only saving grace is an odd-couple duo of special investigators tasked with the unenviable job of roaming the countryside and explaining the unexplainable. Leading the charge is Katagishi, a mild-mannered, perpetually exhausted chain-smoker. Trailing behind him is junior investigator Miyaki—the bubbly, outspoken, and bright‑eyed yen to Katagishi’s “I’m too old for this” yang (despite him looking barely 30). Although they’re not quite a Mulder and Scully pairing, they bounce off of each other pretty well as a weary straight man and a positively beaming slacker trekking from one podunk town to the next, stumbling into all manner of cryptid absurdities.
So far, their cases have included the aforementioned titan-sized precipitation, organs vanishing from corpses in a morgue, and a village whose residents insist they’re immortal after cannibalizing a mermaid. Yeah, the people Katagishi and Miyaki meet are just as bizarre as the creepypasta creatures they’re investigating.
While the series is still very much in the early stages of where it’s going, with one volume out and a second one on the way, what’s notable about Divine Incursions is that not all of its cases are an easy fit for the monster-of-the-week formula where they inevitably triumph. If anything, the series takes a page out of Otherside Picnic‘s playbook by having its duo know when to leave well enough alone by running the other way when they’re in over their heads or throwing their hands up and admitting when they can only grasp the frame but not the full tapestry of their cases.
So if you’re looking for a supernatural series that flexes its brain to solve problems rather than throwing hands, be sure to add Divine Incursions to your growing manga backlog.
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