The theory of conceptual metaphor (CMT) provides a cognitive insight into metaphor by exploring the correlation between concepts and experience. Radically different from traditional rhetorical approaches, CMT highlights the universality of metaphor based on generalized evidence. However, when this approach is applied in literary studies, it has often been criticized for a top-down search for conventional metaphors while overlooking the creativity of literary metaphors. This study proposes an analytical framework combining the CMT approach at the cognitive level with the observation of textual expressions of metaphors and within this framework it conducts a comparative analysis between the source text of Autumn Water, a novella written by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and the target text to trace the cognitive processes of two types of metaphors – conceptual and image metaphors. With this comparative analysis as a starting point, it then describes how these metaphors contribute to narrative and open up a “hallucinatory realistic” story world in the source text and how such metaphors are reproduced in the target text. Since both conceptual metaphors and image metaphors in essence originate from the fundamental conception grounded in the author’s experience and knowledge, it is of interest to note that the author frequently resorts to multi-level simultaneous mappings that overlie one another to reinforce the impacts of textual experience on readers. With these metaphors a fictive texture that has been termed “hallucinatory realism” is constructed in both the source and target text, where conventional concepts based on experience from the reality and images triggered by those creative mappings are integrated to present extraordinary scenes of nature and add the supernatural mystery to the story world.