Divine Incursions Volume 2 Review

Right at the end of 2025 (or early ‘26 here in the UK), Yen Press debuted the first volume of Divine Incursions. Offering readers something different in the form of a modern-day supernatural series, this one successfully stood out from the crowd, but how will a second volume shake out? Let’s take a look!

For this instalment of the series, we’re going back in time twenty years before Volume 1. Back when the Special Investigations Division was known as the Divine Incursions Task Force. Here our main character is Sadahito Uyuu, a young man who’s been making a living as a con man. His run comes to an end when he’s finally arrested by a man called Kiruma who is oddly interested in the scam Uyuu was pulling. Although Kiruma used to be a detective, he now works on the Divine Incursions Task Force with associate professor Ryouko, who specialises in folklore studies.

The two of them don’t have any interest in throwing Uyuu in jail; instead, they want to use his abilities. Ever since he was a child, our protagonist has been able to see things that no one else can: those of a supernatural nature, be they spectres or gods. There are plenty of incidents out there that need investigating, and since Uyuu has no real interest in paying for his crimes in a traditional sense, he agrees to go along with Kiruma’s offer. Together, the two will come face to face with unimaginable threats against humanity…

Just like Volume 1, this book is made up of 7 individual stories about different gods and the towns and villages that worship or are otherwise involved in keeping their stories alive. But unlike the first release, there’s more of a throughline here since Uyuu and Kiruma aren’t just being sent to investigate and do nothing about the gods. Behind the scenes, higher-ups in the Divine Incursions Task Force want to use the power of these gods against one another to control them and use them for their own ends. And as an outsider to all this, Uyuu gets to see firsthand how frightening humanity can be, never mind the supernatural beings he comes into contact with.

Over time, there’s a central story being built up and a conclusion that ties it all together. It feels a lot neater than the first book was, and it also ends in such a way that explains why the Special Investigations Division handles cases so differently in the modern day. The investigating only to write a report and do nothing finally makes way more sense now that we’ve seen the history of how the department came into being.

If you were on the fence about continuing after the first book, I’d certainly encourage you to revisit. I think Volume 2 completes the first novel in a way I wasn’t expecting at the start, and now we have a firmer foundation for continuing on from here. I like the new cast of characters we got to spend time with too, especially the sort of buddy-cop relationship between Uyuu and Kiruma. It’s very different to the relationship Katagishi and Miyaki shared in Volume 1, which helped keep the individual god stories fresh even though the series has a very repetitive structure for telling them.

As mentioned, Divine Incursions Volume 2 comes to the West thanks to Yen Press under the Yen On imprint and has been translated by James Balzer. The release reads well and feels smoother in the terminology used; I didn’t notice any instances of Japanese terms being left in the way they were the first time (where we had both ‘god’ and ‘kami’, for example). And I’m not sure if that’s due to the original work being written differently or just a change in translation/editing for the English version. Once again nothing in the way as extras since there are no illustrations, so no colour pages or anything to accompany.

The series still looks to be ongoing in Japan with four volumes available at the time of writing. However, here in English there’s no sign of #3 in the schedule, and since that currently goes through to the end of the year, it seems like we won’t see more of this until 2027. Which feels very slow for a series with not a great deal of material to get through in the first place.

Overall, Divine Incursions Volume 2 proves another interesting read that readjusts the structure slightly and pays off for it in the end. This is a book that complements the first instalment and builds upon it with interesting new characters and cases to investigate and is well worth checking out if you enjoyed Volume 1.

Our review copy was supplied by the publisher Yen Press