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I continue to be puzzled by the distinction in Japanese between transitive
(“other move”) and intransitive (“self move”) verbs. My understanding is that
the primary determinant is the extent to which the grammatical object (if one
exists) is affected by the action described by the verb. That understanding is
undermined by a sentence such as:

> 本を 忘れました (I forgot the book)

Of course the act of forgetting may have consequences for the book but they
would be indirect. Can indirect consequences have a bearing on transitivity
(in Japanese)? In any case there must be plenty of instances where the act of
forgetting has no consequences (such as “I forgot the king’s name”).

Can someone please explain the rationale, or is it simply another of those
things that one must accept without satisfactory explanation?
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transitivity
By what rationale is わすれるconsidered transitive?
Unfortunately, this is something you have to simply accept. While you can
usually judge the transitivity of a verb easily based on the knowledge you
already have, the transitivity of many verbs are not straightforward. In quite
a few cases, the transitivities of verbs with exactly the same meaning are
different between English and Japanese. Ultimately, you have to remember which
are tricky verbs one by one.

See this questions for examples of tricky verbs: [に vs. を in "to pass a
test"](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/72200/5010)

(By the way, after dozens of years of learning English, I still don't get why
"to see" and "to hear" are transitive but "to look" and "to listen" are
intransitive. All I could do was stop wondering and learn them by rote.)
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answer
My original answer was wrong, so I'll summarise what I've learned from the
comments and from researching a bit more, with thanks to Eiríkr Útlendi.

In English, we usually talk about _syntactic_ transitivity, which has to do
with whether a direct object is present. “I eat a sandwich” features a
transitive verb, but “I eat” is intransitive, because no direct object is
present.

In contrast, Japanese has a notion of _semantic_ transitivity. サンドを食べる
features a transitive verb, which is _still_ transitive in the sentence 食べる,
because the verb affects something else.

It does not seem to me to be particularly important whether a verb is
semantically transitive if we are using it with no object or anything else
attached. However, knowing whether a verb is transitive is definitely
important when it comes to using the correct particles.

We have seen を as a direct object marker, but there are other direct object
markers than を, and を is not always a direct object marker. In “A Dictionary
of Basic Japanese Grammar” by Makino and Tsutsui, direct object marker を is
marked as o¹, while, for example, o² is “a particle which indicates a space
in/on/across/through/along which s.o. or s.t. moves”.

Your question seems to be about how to determine whether a verb is transitive
or not. It seems to me that this can often be inferred from usage. In サンドを食べる,
を is used as o¹, a direct object marker. In 道を歩く, を is not a direct object
marker, but rather spatial marker o².

Of course, some ambiguity remains. Which usage of を do we see in マラソンを走る? It's
o² according to [this
answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/74254/7890), but that isn't clear
from just looking at the sentence.

Therefore, my best attempt at answering your question is to say that, when one
wants to determine the transitivity of a verb, one should take cues from how
it is used grammatically in examples such as the above, while consulting the
different possible meanings of identically-written particles such as を. “A
Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”, which I mentioned above, is useful for
this.

Here are some additional resources I found useful:

  * [This list of transitive and intransitive pairs](http://nihongo.monash.edu/ti_list.html)
  * [“Transitivity and Valency Alternations: Studies on Japanese and Beyond” by Taro Kageyama and Wesley M. Jacobsen](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r-zCDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
  * [A Tofugu article on the topic](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/transitive-intransitive-verbs/) with some useful additional information.
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answer