Yeah, it would be best to make him a teenager. One alternative is to play a child of Wolverine -- maybe X-23 or an OC -- and then you can bring in the actual Wolverine later on as a left-over from Project Rebirth in the 1940s. If you went with his Japanese connections -- either a teenage Wolverine or a teenage SON or DAUGHTER or CLONE of Wolverine -- we could say Luke met him before when he was in Japan with Mr. Hajima, his mentor. Whatever way you do this, the character could have spent some of his childhood in Canada and some in Japan, and then maybe he came to New York to attend college or something and he started hanging out with Luke again. 

Think about what you'd like to do with the character and let me know :D.