The present paper applies the corpus retrieval software, Antconc, to study Mo Yan’s novel Frog from the perspectives of theme, plot, and means of character shaping. The extracted keywords not only confirm the theme of Frog is closely related to family planning, but also reflect the continuity between Frog and other works of Mo Yan as well as the unity of local standpoint and humanistic position in the novel. Furthermore, by annotating manually all the retrieval results of the major role “Aunt” according to their contents and emotional tendency, the paper finds that the seemingly irrelative descriptions of aunt’s love and family life, appearance and temperament, actually play a critical role in character shaping and plot development.