Abstract
This paper looks at the type of accounts found on worksheets completed by eighth-grade students exploring the differences and commonalities between Taro Okamoto’s Rules of the Forest and Kaii Higashiyama’s Forest with a White Horse, both in intellectual and aesthetic terms. Based on this information, the study focused on whether students were more receptive to “emotion” or “intention” when understanding themes.
This study revealed that fundamentally the difference between the two is determined by an ability for aesthetic appreciation. This is ranked in the first instance by counting the number of times a student senses an aesthetic property in the plastic features of the work. Those in the group with high receptivity to aesthetic properties were able to sense more themes as emotions than those with medium or low receptivity.
