USA. Anime convention, Saturday morning. A father is walking with his son. The boy is maybe nine, wearing a paper Goku wig and a foam sword too big for him. He stops in front of me. His mouth opens. He has forgotten how to speak. I am in full armor. I came here for a meeting about a tea demonstration. I did not know the building had been given over to a thousand small warriors. The father crouches behind the boy. A tired man in a DBZ shirt from 1998. The shirt is older than the boy. "Tell him, bud. You practiced." The boy bows. Not a Japanese bow. A nine-year-old bow. Stiff at the waist, eyes still on my sword. "Konnichiwa," he whispers. "I'm Goku." I return the bow. Deeper than I should have. The boy nearly falls over from joy. The father puts a hand on his son's shoulder. "He's been waiting all week. Made me drive three hours." I ask the father, very seriously, if the boy is the heir of his house. The father blinks. "He's my kid, yeah." I nodded. I understood at last. This is a coming-of-age. The father has brought his son to the gathering of warriors so the son may stand before an elder and not run away. In my line this is done at thirteen with a wooden sword and a long walk. Here it is done at nine with foam and a parking garage in Ohio. The boy tugs his father's hand. "Dad. Dad. Ask him." The father coughs. "He wants to know if your sword is, like, real." I knelt so the boy could see the hilt without craning his neck. I told him the sword had been in my family for four hundred years. The boy's eyes did not blink. The father's eyes did not blink either. "Dude," the father said, quiet. "Holy cow." The boy reached out one finger. Stopped. Looked at his father for permission. The father nodded, slow, like a man at a christening. The boy touched the saya with the tip of his finger and pulled it back. He had touched a sword carried at Sekigahara. He was wearing a paper wig. "I'm gonna remember this forever," the boy said. Not performing. Just telling me a fact. The father's eyes did a thing. He looked away at the ceiling tiles. He pretended to read a sign. I looked away too, to spare him. I asked him one more question. I asked him if his father had ever taken him to such a gathering at nine. He laughed once with no sound. "Nah. My dad worked Saturdays. I watched Toonami in the basement by myself." Then I understood the whole building. Every father in this hall was completing a passage that had been left half-finished in their own basement, alone, with a bowl of cereal, in 1998. The boys were a pretext. The men were here for themselves at nine. The boy bowed again, deeper this time, and ran toward a booth selling plastic kunai. The father stayed a second longer. The small American nod, chin up, no words. I bowed to him. Full bow. The bow I owe a man who has carried a thing thirty years to hand it across in a parking garage in Ohio. He walked after his son. I stood in the hallway in four hundred years of steel and watched a generation finish the trip its fathers could not take it on. The convention had not opened yet. The hall was quiet. The boy's voice carried. "Dad. Dad. Did you see his sword."