Disappointing "Dreaming in Chinese"

"Dreaming in Chinese" was a big disappointment to me. I decided to read the book because the author is a linguist and, perhaps more importantly, the wife of James Fallows of the Atlantic, who, along with Chalmers Johnson, created quite a stir as a revisionist on Japan issues in the late 1980s. (I believe he was not criticizing Japan, but rather lamenting the way the US was going then.) The book has some linguistic perspective but to me it contains very few things that are new. Before China, she had stayed for a few years in Japan too, and the book tells me that she had learned almost nothing about similarities between the Japanese and Chinese languages. She mentions difficulties she encountered on Japanese honorifics but nothing about Chinese characters that the Japanese use. Does it mean she didn’t notice Chinese characters used in Japanese or she just ignored them. If she had been more attentive on this, she wouldn’t have told us as surprises such things that are so commonplace to me or us.  Well, she probably wrote the book for the audience not like me.