Abstract This thesis proposes to read The Unconsoled under the scope of cosmopolitanism. Ishiguro is skilled in transforming the major events or topics into narratives of trivial, minor, or transient episodes of daily life. In this novel, he represents the complication of international involvements or commitments through an ordinary conflict between family and work. One of my first concerns is to investigate what kind of ethical relations and obligations this novel calls for. The other is to explore how the dream-like ploys in this novel influence and confuse the ethical recognition of the distance and the proximity. I try to argue that we not only have obligations to immediate, domestic fellows, but also to foreign, distant people when the demands are concrete and the commitments are needed. In Chapter One, I give a survey of scholarship on The Unconsoled to indicate the insufficiencies of current interpretations. And then by discussing the limitations of the postcolonial approach and the stereotype of ethnic labels, I try to emphasize that cosmopolitan reading is a way to rethink modes of belonging and practices of citizenship in Ishiguro’s works. There are two focuses in Chapter Two. The first one is to investigate the recent developments of cosmopolitanism to see what they inherit from and how they may reverse this tradition. My point is that both normative and ethical cosmopolitan thinkers share an ethical turn and persist on multiple attachments and commitments beyond national borers. Secondly, in order to resolve the conflict between the protagonist Ryder’s domestic and professional duties, I will argue that cosmopolitan ethics is a practice of negotiation and a passion for the everyday experience of the impossible. Ryder’s ethical implications have a more complicated development in surreal scenes set in The Unconsoled. Chapter Three indicates the illogical arrangement of time and space in this novel is the metaphor of changing time in Europe. I will argues although the “vacillation of borders”, in Balibar’s words, uncouples the ethical commitment from the idea of sovereign states, our cosmopolitan involvements are confused by the instability of sudden proximity and distance during the time of changes. Chapter Four will conclude my thesis. To designate Ishiguro as cosmopolitan or to read his works in this way is not to claim that the nation is no longer part of our lived experiences but to imagine the world beyond national borders. Using cosmopolitan ethics as a kind of humanistic discourse, I attempt to point out that Ishiguro breaks the boundary between literature and life and broadens the way we talk about nation and literature.